Pearl Abyss, the developers of Black Desert Online, have recently caused an uproar by getting Reddit to remove a post that revealed secrets of the game. Now the developers are apologizing to the community and will disclose the secret stats in the future.
Black Desert is a complex sandbox MMO that often remains opaque even to seasoned players. There are secret stats in the game that no one but the developers truly knows. It is therefore impossible to determine exactly what a specific item can do.
To finally unveil these mysteries, a data miner revealed secrets of the game code on Reddit. However, the developers at Pearl Abyss did not find this amusing and instructed the moderators of the subreddit to delete the post. They feared the information would be used for cheating.
The mods complied, triggering a shitstorm. In the end, it probably became too much for Pearl Abyss and publisher Kakao Games, and they decided to reach out to the players again.
Developers apologize and provide secret stats
To smooth things over, Jae-hee Kim, Executive Producer of Black Desert Online at Pearl Abyss, wrote an open letter to the community. In it, he apologizes for the confusion caused and for failing to provide concrete information about the stats.
Therefore, they intend to do everything differently in the future and disclose all stats moving forward. They initially thought the “secret stats” were a nice idea, but it has become clear that it creates too great a gap between players who know and those who have no idea.
Thus, in the future, values for accuracy, damage reduction, and evasion will be visible in tooltips.
The datamining shitstorm was not the only scandal surrounding Black Desert Online. Many users complain about the strong pay-to-win gambling factor of the house cats in the game!
